It-i violated Principle C-i
After a rather long discussion today in a reading group regarding the possibility of obviating Principle C violations with extraposition (e.g., I have him[i] a book yesterday that I’m sure Biff[i] will like), wherein several people were absolutely solid in their opinion that extraposition couldn’t save the violation, I found tonight’s episode of the Conan O’Brian show rather funny.
Instead of the normal monologue, they parodied the State of the Union address with a State of the State address. The fake news commentator was announcing the names of people entering the studio (This is Joe Shmoe, Conan’s executive producer, and he’s followed by …”). I was then rewarded with this line:
“Here comes Conan’s spiritual advisor, Father Delaney. And he is followed by Delaney’s spiritual advisor, Rabbi Moskowitz.”
Excellent. Now, of course there was an ever-so-slight contrastive stress on Delaney, and as we all know, contrastive stress makes everything better (or did it make the world go round? maybe it makes the WORLD go aROUND).
Am I missing something or is
supposed to make no sense at all?
It’s supposed to make sense. That is, the sentence is supposed to mean “I gave a book (yesterday) to Biff, and it’s a book that I’m sure he (= Biff) will like.”
The point in the context of the article (Linguistic Inquiry 35:1-45) is that in some cases extraposition can save a Principle C violation. In this case, the “extraposition” (they use the term in a somewhat different way than it usually is) is the movement of [that I'm sure Biff will like] to the right of [yesterday]. It would normally be right-adjoined to the phrase [a book]. Because it is extraposed to a position higher than [him], Principle C does not apply and the sentence is grammatical.
I realize it sounds bad out of context, but I actually tested it out the other day and it was totally fine. The sentence I used was “So Percy was talking, and then Jules gave [him] this look that [Percy] had no clue what it was supposed to mean, so he….” It went by without comment, and the person understood perfectly what was going on. (I’ve changed the names =)
Not to ramble on, but it seems to me that Principle C is really more of a pragmatic or Gricean phenomenon than any restriction on the syntax (or syntax/semantics interface, or wherever it’s supposed to happen). Given that (1) within a clause, coreference is normally accomplished with reflexive pronouns (Biff hates himself), and (2) across clauses, coreference is done with pronouns (Biff finally noticed the clues I’d left for him), one doesn’t expect to hear an R-expression in a coreferencial “slot.” The result is that you assume that you should interpret the denotation of the R-exp as distinct from any other referents in the sentence. But that doesn’t mean that this expectation can’t be defeated in the right circumstances.)
Yeah, so my misunderstanding was actually just because of a typo. I read “I have” as “I have” and not as “I gave” and therein lies the nonsense. I now understand what you were saying. And agree. Condition C is certainly the fishiest of the three.